Highlights

1969: Fields - Fields

While Fields are officially only three people, throughout their lone LP they get help in all the right places. That's not to say they can't hold their own; both guitarist Richard Fortunato and bassist Patrick Burke bend their timbre to sound like everything from harmonicas to saxophones. But they also know that a grimy sax section can sound pretty badass, and hell, throw in some viola for a little mysteriousness. Furthermore, they managed to snag Motown's Brenda Holloway and the Raylettes -- whom Ray Charles apparently wasn't using at the time -- to lend backing vocals to four of the tracks.

Fields has its roots in the California garage and psych scene, but they find the most success here with strutting swamp-funk, such as the none-too-subtle romper "Jump On You." "Sun Would Set," on the other hand, is the kind of utopian haze that has fared less well, and the snowballing tom-tom break at the end of "Bide My Time" disappointingly leads nowhere. Why would you build it up like that just to fade out?

For a decade that was so reluctant to accept a single that was longer than 3 minutes, the '60s seemed to quickly catch on to the long-ass closing track, with 10-20 minute jams cropping up all over the place. "Love Is The Word," clocking in at close to 19 minutes, is significantly darker than its title would suggest. Neither one long boogie-jam nor a cathartic exorcism, the track churns through the spectrum of murky fuzz, from sly seduction to cautious urging to a driving trance, breaking up only for a silly little section about the animals in the zoo having a meeting to bust out. Although sections overlap too much to be called a suite, the song nonetheless covers a lot of stylistic ground while still serving the whole. Still, by the time it wraps up you feel like you've gone through some sort of tumultuous love affair: tense, passionate, vaguely exotic at times, but ultimately resolving satisfyingly.

It'd be easy to slap a lost-classic sticker on any little-known album that's still listenable today, but the true test is whether it can still resonate when taken out of the context of the era in which it was made. Fields' brand of loosey-bloozey psych would still sound fine in a bar today or sandwiched between Cream and Love on a good classic rock station. While it could never be called cutting edge, as long as it stays neither too sloppy or spacey this kind of music will always retain a sense of earthy promiscuity.

Blonder Tongue Audio Baton opens with a sound clip of what I imagine is packaging tape being sealed around a box. And for the duration of the record I try to determine whether I’m the one sealing the box or if I’ve been crammed inside haphazardly. It’s an interesting dilemma since The Swirlies do so much to both alienate and incorporate the listener into their music. On one hand the Boston quartet is masterful at harvesting melody out of molesting walls of noise. On the other, the record mingles esoteric scribbles of sampling that cause the listener to feel like they’re the third wheel in a joke they don’t get. To this latter point though, these samples -- of men taunting each other, tape dispensers and a rant on the medicinal benefits of natural substances -- draw me in closer for reasons I don’t understand.

Recorded amid the high waters of shoegaze creativity and the mounting currents of indie rock, Blonder Tongue Audio Baton maintains a confluence of both genres. This said, The Swirlies infuse the recording with doses of psychedelia that are heavy enough to help to establish a firm identity. Throughout this record we find song after song of noisy slabs blended with charming hooks. “Bell,” the first ‘song’ on the record, with its ringing squall of guitars, yields to a sloppy, lo-fi melody reminiscent of early Pavement. As leveling as any piece of Loveless-Psychocandy, “Jeremy Parker” is a huge song that combines a hint of a dance beat with the cold, fragile vocal interplay occurring between Seana Carmody and Damon Tutunjian. Musically massive, it hits upon the record’s most obvious theme: the sexual tension between men and women. The thematic, effect-ridden, and sampled aspects of Blonder Tongue, however, should not deter the listener from understanding what this really is: a guitar record. With the vocals and rhythm floating low in the mix, the blaring guitars are impossible to ignore.

For historical purposes, Blonder Tongue Audio Baton, is a fun record to reinvestigate. For one, the styles that it presents have been celebrated, then worn, then abandoned, then reinvented since its release. That’s not to say The Swirlies themselves “invented” anything. Rather, its release among similar records like Crooked Rain Crooked Rain, Going Blank Again, and For Your Own Special Sweetheart, caused Blonder to receive less attention than it deserved. So it’s a product of its time. Examining its incorporation of the sounds of the moment, its cryptic agenda of borrowed conversations, and a strong melodic sense, it deserves a place among strong records have synthesized the ideas of others into something genuine and interesting; in or out of the box.

The undertaking of a concept album is always a tricky proposition. The sad truth with regard to the endeavor is that once the artist runs out of songs, or simply runs out of ideas that bolster the overall concept, the artist is nonetheless restricted to the conceptual limitations they’ve imposed upon themselves. The other difficult question one must always ask is: how relevant, or perhaps, how meaningful is the concept in the first place? Robert Callender’s Le Musée de L’Impressionnisme is, as one might imagine, a concept album dealing primarily with the history of the Impressionist movement, but it also serves as a veritable who’s-who gallery of the French Impressionists (well, mostly — the roster also includes Vincent Van Gogh for good measure). And in the interests of fairness, despite the nature of Callender’s early Indian-influenced output, Le Musée de L’Impressionnisme is not the Eastern-tinged sitar fest replete with Gallic flourishes one might expect based solely on the album’s cover art.

Long considered lost (or at any rate, among the most difficult to find psych rarities of its time prior to this reissue), Le Musée de L’Impressionnisme was initially released in the early ‘70s (allegedly in 1972) on the Philips label as a small pressing exclusively in Holland, which might help explain Van Gogh’s inclusion. The record features lyrics sung in French and English, in fairly equal proportions. Musically speaking, the record is a sumptuous mélange of jazz, soul, progressive, and psychedelic rock. As a concept album, however, Le Musée de L’Impressionnisme is frustrating, if not confounding. Let’s be forthcoming about this: given the times in which we’re now living, and the innumerable idiomatic paradigm shifts the world of popular music has undergone toward the nihilistic and egocentric, concept albums of this sort do not age gracefully. Though Callender’s homage to the Impressionists borders on the touching at times, the historical and biographical nature of these tracks has the tendency to come off as tedious.

It’s hard not to suppress a snicker when encountering lyrics such as, “Monet, Monet, Monet, ooh, ooh / I’m singin’ about Claude Monet”; “I’m singin’ ‘bout Toulouse-Lautrec / I said I’m singin’ ‘bout Toulouse-Lautrec”; or, worse, “Mystical madman / mystical, but truly a very sad man was he,” in reference to Van Gogh. Considering the astonishing grandeur of the arrangements, which fall somewhere between the off-kilter, psych-inflected eccentricities of David Axelrod and the slick but capable production values of the Motown era (Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra project even comes to mind on several of these tracks), it’s regrettable to hear these baroquely crafted suites marred by Callender’s cloying bathos. Le Musée de L’Impressionnisme would have been a hardcore crate digger’s dream come true if not for the oppressive profusion of Callender’s admittedly well-intentioned but overly verbose lyrics.

To his enormous credit, and despite the record’s shortcomings, Robert Callender assembled a stunning cast of musicians for Le Musée de L’Impressionnisme, which, ultimately, is majestic, operatic, and epic in its scope. Callender’s arrangements are highly complex without being pretentious and feature deftly played proto-funk musicianship that has the overall effect of sounding slightly ahead of its time. Callender expertly blends psychedelia with R&B and jazz to create an album that, though conceptually antiquated and anachronistic by today’s standards, is elegantly meticulous in its execution all the same.

You may or may not recognize the name of Jean-Marc Cerrone, but you already know what he’s done. This French producer and chops-laden drummer is one of the main originators of disco, which subsequently spawned the funky house plague. But before you start puking, you should hear this out. Although the ideas of Cerrone have been continually watered down and regurgitated by so many weak-willed DJs and point-and-click producers, the original, unbastardized tracks -- if not worthy of your butt-wiggling patronage -- are at least deserving of your respect. These albums were actually played live. The monolith of creativity that forged every note by frail human hand is still being mined today by people with far less character, suckling the passion out a sample at a time like the untalented leaches that they are. Well there’s no need to paw at the shameless imitators any more; go straight to the source. Among other things, Recall Records has re-released Cerrone’s seminal works, namely Cerrone’s Paradise, Supernature 3, and The Golden Touch. The latter album starts to cut the edge of '80s funk cheese, but the other two aforementioned albums are solid gold through and through. “Supernature” and the title track from Cerrone’s Paradise will strike the groove even into the most cynical and cold-hearted soul (I would know… I’m a total prick). This is the disco that remembers there used to be some tits in there, coked up and flopping around on the dance floor. Let’s party like it’s 1979. Dig it.

Listening to this mix album by Bob Sinclair of Marc Cerrone’s classic work, several notions become easily verifiable. For one, in hearing an unadulterated original Cerrone album from start to finish, it’s apparent that Cerrone is an artist (albeit an extremely coked up, white boy, afro-havin’ one), and Bob Sinclair is not. It’s way too easy to see why disco was so popular when you hear the entire 17-minute long “Cerrone’s Paradise” or the gnarly “Supernature.” It’s equally easy to see why house music, for which people like Cerrone were largely responsible, is so horribly banal, especially when trying to stand at attention for all of Sinclair’s Cerrone mix. The perpetual 4/4 beats and mild electronic effects that bumble along without a care, which Sinclair’s ilk obviously loves, suck the living soul out of Cerrone’s classic tracks. Modern house producers aren’t even in the same league as Cerrone was (even current Cerrone fails to live up to his past). Not that point-and-click production isn’t without its merits, it’s just that house producers often tend to merely rehash and hack at concepts with a mouse that people like Cerrone actually played some 30 years ago. Funky disco house has no fresh ideas -- the entire genre rests on grave digging from the creative powerhouses of the past. Suffice it to say, Cerrone recalls a time when the sexuality of disco was vibrant and raunchy, instead of today’s sterile, bland and empty gyrations.

Over the years, I’ve managed to cobble together a conception of what I believe to be, in the Platonic sense, the ideal dive bar. No mere shadow on the wall of a cave, mind you, this image has emerged over time as a rock-solid mental construct, complete with cracked leather booths, a slightly surly staff, and very cheap shots. The centerpiece of the whole grand vision is a jukebox equipped to confound and repel the casual drinker. Every one of a Platonic form’s elements are, of course, equally essential, but the records of the Star Room Boys merit special mention, for they exist so securely at the heart of the ideal dive-bar jukebox as to constitute an utterly indispensable part of its anatomy.

The Star Room Boys formed in Athens, Georgia, in 1995 and went on to produce two LPs under the direction of singer and songwriter Dave Marr before calling it quits in 2002. Lyrically, both records trade in some of country music’s most familiar themes - love, liquor and loss - but they do so without stridency or excessive sentimentality, and with a good deal of moral ambiguity. No doubt this helps to account for the “alt-country” label that critics have applied to the group, but make no mistake, the Star Room Boys are a straight country band. In fact, Marr’s facility with honky-tonk idioms amounts to nothing less than a pitch-perfect mastery of the genre.

While the band’s debut, Why Do Lonely Men and Women Want to Break Each Other’s Hearts,may well be their definitive statement, Marr’s talents as a singer and songwriter are manifest throughout This World Just Won’t Leave You Alone. The opening line of the record, “White lies, blue tears, red eyes, black fears,” crests and crashes on a wave of up-tempo guitars. Many of the remaining tracks are more subdued but no less engaging. Boozy ballads like “Whiskey and You” and “When I’m All the Way Down” showcase Marr’s wonderful voice, which, though slightly less prone to twangy affectation, has aptly been compared to Dwight Yoakam’s. Arguably the highpoint of the entire Star Room Boys catalog, “Cocaine Parties” is a minor masterpiece, in which Marr builds to the first chorus with remarkable restraint and delivers it with climactic conviction. Surely the author of tracks like this and “I’ll Play Angel,” another standout, can be forgiven for the album’s sole misstep, a little rockabilly-tinged regret called “Daydreamer” reminiscent of early Old 97's.

Whether or not they ever emerge from their present obscurity, the Star Room Boy’s legacy should be one of excellence in a much maligned and misunderstood genre. At the very least, they provide the best soundtrack since Hank Williams for a good lonely drunk. While not necessarily a band for amateur alcoholics, anyone with even the slightest tolerance for country music should take the time to sample and savor these songs.

There's a lot of good music out there, and it's not all being released this year. With DeLorean, we aim to rediscover overlooked artists and genres, to listen to music historically and contextually, to underscore the fluidity of music. While we will cover reissues here, our focus will be on music that's not being pushed by a PR firm.